Guide to Citizens’ Rights and Responsibilities

part of people to engage in such interaction with those otherwise unknown to
them, are essential elements and preconditions of liberal democracy.
I N T E L L E C T UA L   O R I G I N S   O F   L I B E R A L   D E M O C R A C Y
Democracy—literally meaning “rule by the people”—has historically taken
many forms. In ancient Athens, democracy meant direct rule by free male citizens.
In the twenty-first century democracy is generally understood to mean indirect
rule, that is, popular rule through elected representatives.
Liberal democracy owes its origins to particular philosophic doctrines and
constitutional developments, which arose especially in England and the United
States. The adjective liberal points to a set of philosophic doctrines emphasiz-
ing human equality that were developed in the early modern period, beginning
roughly in the seventeenth century. The English philosopher John Locke
(1632–1704) argued that legitimate government arises only from consent and
the right to consent, in turn, stems from a fact of nature: human equality.
For Locke, writing in his Second Treatise of Government (1690), the state of
nature that predates all government is a state wherein “Creatures of the same
species and rank . . . should also be equal one amongst another without
Subordination or Subjection.” (Locke 1988, p. 269) According to Locke, because
human beings are by nature political equals (although not equal in all respects),
the only way in which anyone gains legitimate political authority over another is
through the other’s consent. Government remains legitimate only so long as it
protects the 
natural rights
of individual citizens (i.e., those who have entered the
social compact by consenting, explicitly or tacitly, to the particular government).
Natural rights include some things to which individuals are entitled in the state
of nature, such as life, liberty (including freedom of conscience), and property.
A strong conception of rights of the person thus existed at the dawn of modern
liberalism
and continues to inform the practice of liberal democracy worldwide.
Understanding rights is different, however, from preserving and protecting
them in practice. Even majorities can only legitimately consent to pursue the com-
mon good. As Locke maintained, no one is all-wise or all-powerful, and human
reason is influenced by passion. A rudimentary separation of powers doctrine
appeared in Locke, who argued that government by nature consists of the legisla-
tive, executive, and judicial power, and that danger exists in combining these pow-
ers in one set of hands. Such concern for separation also appears in the French
philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755), who, like Locke, was sympathetic to the
relative moderation and tolerance embodied by English constitutionalism. Both
of these philosophers would influence the thinking of the American founders.
H I S T O R I C A L   M I L E S T O N E S
The constitutional history of England is often understood as the unfolding of
liberal institutions and practices largely through the gradual limiting of royal
power, from the Magna Carta (1215), to the Petition of Right (1628), through the
growth of the common law and independent courts. Perhaps the most significant
events surrounded the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and 1689, of which Locke
gave, in part, a theoretical account. The Revolution centered on the flight of the
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natural right: a basic privilege intrinsic to
all people that cannot be denied by the
government
liberalism: a political philosophy advocating
individual rights, positive government action,
and social justice, or, an economic philosophy
advocating individual freedoms and free
markets
■ ■ ■  

Roman Catholic King James II (1633–1701) on the approach of the army of
William of Orange (1650–1702). When parliament gave the crown to William of
Orange and his wife Mary (1662–1694), it did so along with a Declaration of Right
(1689), which, among other things, ended the royal power to suspend laws and
required free and frequent elections for parliament. These moves, coupled with
the barring of future Roman Catholic accession to the British throne, were seen
in accordance with Locke’s theory that legitimate 
sovereign
power only exists as a
result of a social compact between the people—in the form of their representa-
tives in parliament—and the monarch.
By the mid 1760s, Lockean social compact theory was exercising considerable
influence in British North America. Preachers, statesmen, and political activists in
the American colonies argued that the king and parliament ruled America without
the consent of the governed and concomitantly failed to protect the rights of
colonists. Lockean doctrine found perhaps its most succinct expression in
America in the Declaration of Independence (1776). In that document Thomas
Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable,
rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Despite relatively widespread agreement on the principles of just government,
the Americans faced the practical problem of implementing these principles.
Between the Declaration and the Constitutional Convention (1787), Americans real-
ized that individual rights were being violated due to the weaknesses of state gov-
ernments and the even greater weaknesses of the national government created by
the Articles of Confederation (1781). Under the Articles, states retained their sover-
eignty, and the federal government had no real power. Within states, laws lacked
stability, and the executive and judicial branches were enfeebled because they were
subservient to the legislative branches. The U.S. Constitution (1789) provided what
its defenders called an “energetic” national government that was, however,
constrained through numerous institutional mechanisms, including especially sep-
aration of powers.
The constitution provided the institutional framework for liberal democracy
in the United States, although by contemporary standards participation was
limited and minority rights were ill protected, especially by the states. However,
widespread consensus existed among America’s founders that the natural rights
principles of the Declaration of Independence made slavery illegitimate, even
though it could not immediately be eliminated. During the U.S. Civil War
(1861–1865), President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) claimed that America must
remain a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” A liberal
democratic core is the center of this definition of American republicanism, for it
does not reduce to simple 
majoritarianism
. In Lincoln’s terms, following Locke,
no person is good enough to rule another person without the other’s consent.
Even after the Civil War, however, black citizens could not reliably exercise
rights to which they were entitled under the constitution, including the right to
vote. The grandest rhetoric of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
as expressed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), was premised on univer-
sal liberal understandings of natural rights. Likewise, the right to vote could be
denied on the basis of sex prior to passage of the Twenty-ninth Amendment
(1920). This eventual enshrinement, like much of the civil rights movement, was
itself premised on embedded liberal understandings. Prior to women’s 
suffrage
,
women were often understood to be “virtually represented” by their husbands.
A common view of America’s founders was that women, as human beings, pos-
sessed natural rights, and the lack of suffrage was not necessarily thought to be a
reflection of innate intellectual or moral disability.
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sovereignty: autonomy; or, rule over a political
entity
■ ■ ■  
majoritarianism: the practice of rule by a
majority vote
suffrage: to vote, or, the right to vote

The French Revolution (1787–1799) followed closely on the heels of the
American Revolution. Throughout the eighteenth century, many members of
the French intellectual classes had found inspiration in the Glorious Revolution,
and the American Revolution gave further impetus to democratic sentiments.
The French Revolution, which overthrew the French monarchy, did promote
democratic reforms, but it could hardly be called liberal insofar as individual
rights were notoriously insecure throughout the revolutionary period. By
reducing democracy to a sense of the popular will, the French Revolution
seemed remarkably unconcerned—even in principle—with liberal rights.
Nevertheless, France has, since the revolution, enjoyed a steady if uneven
march toward liberal democracy. In its twenty-first century incarnation, French
government is characterized by separation of executive, legislative, and judicial
powers and guarantees of individual rights.
Many modern, apparently stable liberal democracies are of recent constitu-
tional vintage. Few constitutional orders (with the notable exceptions of England
and the United States) date back prior to the twentieth century. For example,
Germany, Italy, and Japan owe their contemporary liberal institutions to their
defeats on the battlefield in World War II (1939–1945). Spain and Portugal
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WEST BERLINERS WATCH EAST GERMANS DISMANTLE THE BERLIN WALL ON NOVEMBER 12, 1989.
After the end of World War II in 1945,
Germany’s capital, Berlin, was divided into the Soviet-controlled East Berlin and Western-occupied West Berlin and, in 1961, the
East German government constructed the Berlin Wall to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to West Germany in search of a better
life.
(SOURCE: AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS)

had highly 
autocratic
forms of government (which were neither liberal nor dem-
ocratic) as recently as the 1970s. The countries of Eastern Europe and those com-
posing the former Soviet Union only began moving toward liberal democracy
with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With this historic event, some—including
the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952)—argued forcefully
that the liberal democratic idea had triumphed in world history. That is to say,
when the Berlin Wall fell, so did the most serious remaining intellectual alterna-
tive to liberal democracy, namely, Marxist communism. Like other challengers that
had fallen by the wayside, communism denied human beings equal recognition
at the level of both government and civil society.
India is the world’s largest democracy, having imported parliamentary insti-
tutions from England in a constitution of 1950. Yet India’s society is sometimes
too traditional in nature to be truly liberal. Communal loyalties (often in oppo-
sition to official state policy) stand in the way of a smoothly functioning civil
society. Not only does serious religious strife between Hindus and Muslims
continue, but also certain traditional religious beliefs prevent the development
of a culture of trust and voluntary cooperation. From the mid- to late twentieth
century, India experienced serious problems at the government level in main-
taining separation of powers and of preserving individual rights.
All liberal democratic nations today recognize, explicitly or implicitly, the
inseparable philosophic principles of human freedom and political equality and
their significance for government and society. Liberal democratic principles might
be universal, but this does not imply they can be implemented universally or
immediately. That many nations remain outside the family of liberal democracies
is a testament to the enduring importance of cultural, religious, political, and
moral traditions that cut against liberal democracy.
E N D U R I N G   P R O B L E M S   A N D   P R O S P E C T S
For the newest liberal democracies and those nations that aspire toward
liberal democracy, some problems seem obvious, including lack of experience
with liberal democratic institutions and the remnants of sometimes hostile
political cultures. Even in the longest established and most powerful liberal
democracies, theoretical and practical problems abound, both from within and
from without.
Of the obvious problems from within, protecting minority rights is a peren-
nial concern, because of the basic tension between the claims of liberalism on
the one hand and democracy, or majority rule, on the other. Of the obvious
problems from without, liberal democracies have from their earliest days been
challenged on the battlefield and in the world of ideas. At first, resistance came
from clerical establishments and then later from powerful illiberal 
ideologies
such as Nazism and communism.
Less obvious challenges from within have to do with the status of the
consent principle itself. At least partly from the French Revolution came a version
of liberalism that opposes traditional moral and social authority but not the over-
all power of the state. The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805–1859) in his work Democracy in America (1840) warned of the dangers
of governmental power and 
centralization
coupled with a weak civil society. He
suggested that people who crave or acquiesce to such government power for the
sake of immediate comfort lose the capacity for self-government. As government
takes over the traditional workings of the marketplace and civil society, people
are expected to do less for themselves and for the common good and so less
can be expected of them politically. It is “difficult to imagine,” he claimed, “how
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ideology: a system of beliefs composed of
ideas or values, from which political, social, or
economic programs are often derived
centralize: to move control or power to
a single point of authority
autocracy: a political system in which one
individual has absolute power
■ ■ ■  

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people who have entirely given up managing their own affairs could make a wise
choice of those who are to do that for them. One should never expect a liberal,
energetic, and wise government to originate in the votes of a people of servants.”
(Tocqueville 1988, p. 694.) In this view, liberal democracy needs freedom in the
form of spontaneous, non-governmental activities and organizations, which also
provide social cohesion. In the absence of such activities and organizations,
hyperindividuality and moral libertinism necessitate more and more state con-
trol, which encourages still less active citizenship.
In the twenty-first century, those on the liberal right (or “classical liberals,”
as they are sometimes called) are inclined to share de Tocqueville’s concerns
and support the market and limited government not simply for economic
reasons but also as a check on state power and as a means of developing
citizenly virtues. On the other hand, those on the liberal left often see state
power in its modern, administrative incarnation to be a positive good. In their
view, such power is necessary for social justice and to tame the worst effects of
the marketplace.
Whatever the merits of these arguments, it is clear that liberal democracy
requires freedom to be political in a meaningful consensual way but also neces-
sitates freedom from politics, that is, freedom to engage in one’s own pursuits.
Democracy would be 
totalitarian
rather than liberal if citizens were constantly
occupied by obligations to the state and were able without constraint to impose
on other citizens similar obligations.
The ability to impose nonconsensually one’s views on matters of fundamen-
tally contested moral and constitutional principles raises yet another challenge
to liberal democracy. Such impositions are invariably linked to questions of over-
all government power, who exercises it, and the manner in which it is exercised.
In the United States this problem has taken the form of concern over the limits
of judicial power. Of all branches of government, the judiciary is, by design, the
least consensual. It is subject to popular control only very indirectly. To the
extent modern liberalism exalts the individual qua individual, certain concep-
tions of rights might well be in tension with conceptions of the common good.
The power of the state in the form of nonconsensual courts can be used to over-
turn laws that might be seen as legitimate consensual decisions of the popular
branches of government.
See also: 
Democracy.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
Ceaser, James W. Liberal Democracy and Political Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Connolly, William. The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd ed. Oxford, U.K: Blackwell, 1993.
Dahl, Robert A. Democracy and Its Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Deutsch, Kenneth L., and Walter Soffer. The Crisis of Liberal Democracy. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1987.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
Glendon, Mary Ann. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York:
Free Press, 1991.
Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom (1942). Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Holden, Barry. Understanding Liberal Democracy, 2nd ed. London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1993.
totalitarianism: a form of absolute govern-
ment that demands complete subjugation by
its citizens
■ ■ ■  

Jaffa, Harry V. A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil
War. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, (1690),
ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Macpherson, C. B. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press, 1977.
Mill, John Stewart. On Liberty (1859). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1978. 
Muncie, Mitchell S., ed. The End of Democracy? Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing
Company, 1997.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. (1835), ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George
Lawrence. Reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1988.
Watson, Bradley C. S. Civil Rights and the Paradox of Liberal Democracy. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 1999.
Bradley C. S. Watson
Liberia
Liberia is located on the western tip of Africa. It is bordered on the east by
Côte d’Ivoire, on the west by Sierra Leone, on the north by Guinea, and the south
by the Atlantic Ocean. Liberia has a total land area of 69,187 square kilometers
(43,000 square miles), encompassing fifteen political subdivisions called counties.
Liberia as a nation was founded in the nineteenth century by the American
Colonization Society as a refuge for liberated slaves from the United States.
The population was estimated at 3.4 million in July 2004. Due to two civil
wars (1989–1997 and 1999–2003), about half of the population is in Monrovia,
the capital city. Prior to the war, Monrovia had an estimated population of
250,000. About 1 million people are internally displaced throughout the coun-
try and about another 1 million are living abroad, including in various refugee
camps in the West African belt.
Facing the Atlantic Ocean, the coastline is characterized by lagoons, mangrove
swamps, and major river-deposited sandbars; the inland grassy plateau supports
limited agriculture. There are also dense forests rich in various tree species.
Four major periods can be used to examine the history of Liberia: precolo-
nial (before 1820), colonial (1820–1839), 
commonwealth
(1839–1847), and
independence (1847–present). During the precolonial era, Liberia was known
as the “Grain Coast.” The name was given to the area by Portuguese explorers
to reflect the abundance of grain on the territory. Various 
indigenous
ethnic
groups occupied the area, each with its own political system.
When the settlers from the United States arrived at the beginning of the
colonial period, their indigenous kin initially greeted them warmly. However,
conflict ensued between the settlers and the various indigenous ethnic groups
when it became apparent that the settlers were not interested in forging a part-
nership with the indigenes in the state-building project. The attitude of the set-
tlers was conditioned by their belief that because they were 
repatriated
from the
United States, they were therefore superior to the indigenes. The settlers
attempted to recreate the American Southern plantation system under which
they would be the overlords and the indigenes would be the serfs. The ideolog-
ical foundation for the settlers-indigenes divide was provided by a caste and class
system. Under this system, social groups were defined by two theoretically
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commonwealth: a government created to
advance the common good of its citizens
indigene: a person who has his origin in a
specific region
■ ■ ■  
repatriate: to return to the country of one’s
birth or citizenship

distinct, but in reality overlapping, characteristics. Very often
obvious caste distinctions, based on skin color and ancestral
origin, coincided with differences defined by the relationship of
each group to the means of production.
However, there was a major conflict among the settlers
between the light-skinned and the dark-skinned settlers. The
former espoused the idea of being superior to the latter on the
basis of skin pigmentation; hence, the light-skinned settlers
wanted to dominate the polity. There was also conflict between
the settlers and the American Colonization Society, which gov-
erned Liberia from 1820 to 1837. The central issue revolved
around the control of the colony. The Liberian Colony was con-
trolled by a bureaucracy headed by the agent of the American
Colonization Society, who served as the governor. The dynamics
of the political system reflected a typical colonial situation in
which the colonizers suppressed and dominated the colonized.
By 1837 the American Colonization Society had delegated
some authority over most domestic matters to the settlers
(especially the light-skinned settlers), except in judicial matters.
The emergence of the light-skinned settlers as the colonial
agents further fueled the conflict between them and their dark-
skinned kin in the settler stock.
In 1847 the light-skinned settlers led the efforts to declare
Liberia an independent and sovereign state. The indigenes, who
constituted the overwhelming majority of the population, were
denied citizenship under the 1847 Constitution of Liberia but were
forced to pay taxes and to perform sundry public works tasks.
The post-independence period was marked by various
epochal events. In 1926 the intervention of the Firestone
Plantations Company as a private investor introduced wage
labor and the subsequent establishment of a modern class
system in the Liberian political economy (the ruling and worker
classes). The “Open Door Policy” enunciated in 1944 by the
regime of President William V. S. Tubman (1895–1971) spurred
the influx of multinational corporations and other foreign busi-
nesses into the Liberian economy. Also during the Tubman presidency
(1944–1971), the indigenes were granted citizenship, and women were granted
the right to vote.
Despite its laudable pioneering efforts, the Tubman era is remembered for
the suffocation of democracy as reflected, among other things, in the creation of
a
de facto
one-party state after the purging of opposition parties and politicians
in 1955. President Tubman died in office in 1971, after ruling Liberia for twenty-
seven consecutive years. His vice president, William R. Tolbert (1913–1980),
replaced Tubman as president. On his ascendancy, President Tolbert pledged to
reform the 
authoritarian
political system in Liberia. In this vein, he eliminated
several of the dreaded security services and took measures to liberalize the polit-
ical system. However, amid the rise of various reformist political interest groups,
like the Movement for Justice in Africa and the Progressive Alliance of Liberia
(later the Progressive People’s Party, which was banned in 1980), the Tolbert
regime betrayed its political liberalization agenda by taking measures to restrict
political participation and criticism of the regime. For example, various dracon-
ian and antidemocratic laws such as the Sedition Law were enacted. At the core
of the retreat to authoritarianism during the Tolbert era was the pressure from